Ritual Magick -- does it work?

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Re: Ritual Magick -- does it work?

Postby Stephen Morgan » Mon Oct 03, 2011 4:21 am

Enki-][ wrote:For what it's worth, some of the stuff from the Simon Necronomicon is actually based on real Sumerian texts, but mostly it appears to be hacked and patched together in a patchwork way so as to relate some arbitrary other material to the Lovecraft mythos obliquely. Assuming that egregores are in fact persistent between people and related by something more specific than the archetypes they echo, it's quite possible that the patchwork nature generated a kind of patchwork egregore that draws power from both the popularity of the Lovecraft mythos and the long history on Sumerian and Babylonian workings that the Simon Necronomicon perverted in its mixture.

As you can probably discern from my nick, though, I am a bit of an intellectual elitist in terms of Sumerian mythology, and so my obvious dislike of the Simon Necronomicon is probably more of a visceral gut reaction due to emotional attachment to the original body of mythology, ^d Enki in particular.


Yes, the Simon is not at all an accurate reflection of ancient magical practice. Which isn't to say that it isn't a valid form of modern magical practice. It depends on whence the power of magic. Does it come from the forms themselves, the vibrations of the sounds from the magic words, and so on, or is the power immanent withint he magician and merely requiring focus? Or does it come from some external force, perhaps an egregori, which merely requires some formal request, form unimportant. Not an actual egregori, they're all in prison.
Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that all was vanity; but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, and make it possible. -- Lawrence of Arabia
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Re: Ritual Magick -- does it work?

Postby Lord Balto » Mon Oct 03, 2011 11:32 am

Stephen Morgan wrote:
Yes, the Simon is not at all an accurate reflection of ancient magical practice. Which isn't to say that it isn't a valid form of modern magical practice. It depends on whence the power of magic. Does it come from the forms themselves, the vibrations of the sounds from the magic words, and so on, or is the power immanent withint he magician and merely requiring focus? Or does it come from some external force, perhaps an egregori, which merely requires some formal request, form unimportant. Not an actual egregori, they're all in prison.


The question is whether ritual magick performs above the background noise. In other words, does it work any better than writing a list of requests on a piece of paper and putting them in a drawer to be looked at a year later? Versus going thru some elaborate ritualistic nonsense and then waiting a year to see if it worked. Done scientifically, one might find that the ritualistic version worked less often than the nonritualistic version. And this can only be determined empirically by experimentation, not by the para-philosophical method you appear to be using.
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